Reed Ide
In 1960 my parents purchased eleven acres of land in Woodstock, Connecticut, and on that they planned a Cape Cod style house in which our four-person nuclear family would live. My mother, especially, wanted a perfect house—reflecting the years of an early New England housing presence that existed, perhaps, mostly in her mind.
My dad worked at the Massachusetts Electric Company, just over the state line. In the early 1960s, the company was tearing down a generating station in the nearby town of Webster, MA. Included in this effort was a tall brick smokestack. From this smokestack emanated my unhappy days!
I remember well the day a large dump truck appeared on the home site and off-loaded what seemed to be many tons of smokestack bricks, all in some form of disrepair. It became my seemingly eternal job to clean each one so it could be used in building our chimney. My pay? “One cent per cleaned brick,” my father told me. Even I knew that one thousand bricks would only yield ten dollars! Worse, I had no choice in the matter. Every brick had to be spotless for that blasted chimney!
I proposed that my friend David’s house had a cinderblock chimney in the basement, and suggested we could do the same. But this remark fell on my mother like a pastor proposing that Jesus dashed out to buy more wine rather than exert himself by enacting the wedding miracle.
On Saturdays, our family would visit the building site. Once arrived, I would take my place on the sawhorse surrounded by those dreadful bricks. Armed with just a hammer, brick chisel, and wire brush, I would spend the better part of the afternoon glued to my perch, while my brother was allowed to frolic in the woods and the small brook that ran across the land.
“You’re the oldest, so you have to behave like the oldest,” my father would say whenever I felt rebellious! Another of his favorite maxims was a holdover from my younger years when I had to dry all the Sunday dinner dishes, right down to those blasted forks in the silverware compartment: “They’ll all be waiting for you when you decide to settle into it,” he would remark when I was particularly upset.
There did come a day when that last brick was cleaned! Surprisingly, I don’t remember much. Sad to say, the figure of what I earned has been relegated to history. Alas, no visitor ever went to the cellar to inspect and admire the all- brick chimney that was my handiwork!
We lived in that house for eight years, until the company transferred my dad again. My parents built the same house again in their new Massachusetts location, this second time with a proper cinderblock chimney below anyone’s sight line.
Today, I live not far from our Connecticut home. I often take my lunch at the roadside restaurant at the end of “our” road. Almost every time, I drive past the house and the haunts of my teenage years. I have thus far resisted the temptation to turn in the driveway. I prefer to keep my fantasies and memories intact.
In my fantasies, I turn in the drive, and see the current owners emerging, questioning who has come to see them and their abode. I never leave the car, instead, I roll down my window. “Go down to the cellar,” I order the owners in my fantasy. “Look at that gorgeous chimney work. All bricks. And, as a child, I cleaned every single one!” With no fanfare, I then back down the drive.
Maybe after my next lunch, I’ll turn in that driveway!